Firefighters remove chair from boy’s head

Spokane Valley firefighters extracted a boy’s head from a Pizza Hut chair last week. It was one of 193 calls they handled in the seven days that ended Wednesday.

“We were able to stand the child up and lift the chair over his head,” reads a terse report of the rescue.

The report doesn’t give the boy’s age or say how he got his head stuck in a chair at the Pizza Hut at 323 N. Sullivan Road on April 4.

The only other rescue in the period was a routine removal of an infant accidentally locked inside a car.

Three hazardous-materials calls included an incident about 6 p.m. last Saturday in which a 350-gallon container of kerosene slid off a forklift at Kaiser Aluminum’s Trentwood rolling mill.

Inspector Bill Clifford said about 300 gallons spilled onto an asphalt surface and a small amount got onto an unpaved area. He said firefighters contained the spill and summoned the state Department of Ecology.

Two other hazardous-materials investigations didn’t turn up anything hazardous.

Clifford said two car fires included one that was minor and a suspicious fire that destroyed a vehicle at 3 a.m. Wednesday in an alley in the 7100 block of East 11th Avenue. The suspicious fire remained under investigation later in the week.

Seven structure fires all were minor and seven alarm-system calls all proved to be false alarms, Clifford said.

He said firefighters continued to be called to illegal trash fires. Using a barbecue grill to burn yard waste doesn’t make it legal, Clifford said.

In other calls, firefighters responded to 160 medical emergencies and 11 vehicle accidents. The accidents caused mostly minor injuries, and only one person was taken to a hospital.